Home/The Royal Wedding
It will be some time before we know the actual impact that Friday's royal wedding has had on our economy. There have been predictions, some winners already and some old habits that we do not expect to change, even in this digital world.
The predictions. PWC states that London will see a £107m boost in tourism spend directly related to the royal wedding, however they also warn that 35% of the respondents said the spend would not be additional but come from existing general living expenses, so therefore other areas of the economy will see a negative counter balance.
The winners. Burberry and Asda have already enjoyed the Kate Middleton effect. A £650 Burberry trench coat worn by her last month sold out in one day across their stores and website. A similar £22 version Asda stock saw an alleged 300% jump in sales.
The old habit. Well, that relates to national press. Even in this digital age we still turn to national press when a significant news story breaks or a national event occurs. It will be a few days yet before we know the exact figures and if the public went out on Saturday morning and picked up the various souvenir editions of the daily titles. Past evidence suggests that they will; the coverage of the Barack Obama inauguration, the MPs expenses scandal and the unfortunate earthquake and tsunami events in Japan all saw spikes in national press circulation.
With regards to the royal wedding on Thursday last week the national press were gearing up production runs for Saturday 30th. The Daily Express was up 40%, The Sun up 4.5%, The Times up 18%, The Daily Mail, which already ran a royal wedding DVD promotional giveaway on 16th April that saw a boost in circulation, expects Saturday's circulation to be up 10%. Across all of these titles this equates to some 800k more copies on the newsstands.
Will all those extra eyes on our clients' adverts generate a boost in response or recall? In the past we could only partially answer that question by looking at incoming call statistics, however you cannot dispute that offline advertising drives online response - it has just been difficult to prove. At Artavia we have now developed a methodology to do just that and furthermore it links to our new tool which we call FiRE (Fully Integrated Response Engine)
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